dSavannah Note: This is not a happy post. This may trigger some of you to think of things you’d rather not remember. This may cause you tears. If you are unable to read this, I understand; I can barely write it.

But if you take nothing else away from this post, please go tell the people who are important to you how much they mean to you. Anything could happen, and it could be too late. Even if you’re mad at them, even if you want to shake them, even if they are driving you flat crazy, tell ’em how much you love them. You might never get another chance.

G is for Grief

Three weeks ago, my ex-husband’s stepmother, Cindy, dropped dead. Fifty-six years old. Merely three days prior, she’d been given a clean bill of health at her annual physical.

And that was it. No warning, no disease, no reason, no lingering illness. She was just gone.

The only “consolation”, as it were, for those she left behind, was that she had not suffered. She most likely did not know what hit her.

The Sunday that Cindy passed, I slept all day, fighting a particularly nasty version of bronchitis and a sinus infection that I couldn’t get rid of, having started a second round of antibiotics and medication when the first round hadn’t fixed me up. I only woke up because my hubby knew I needed to eat and to take my meds.

And, because that’s what you do, I checked my phone.

And there was a missed call and a message from a number I did not recognize, and two missed calls, two messages, and a text from my ex-husband.

Now, my ex and I have been apart for over ten years, but we’d been together for 14, college sweethearts, married for 10, and our divorce was amicable. We’ve stayed in touched off and on, maybe speaking on the phone once a year or so. And he had never ever tried to reach me so many times in the same day.

Seeing those missed calls and messages and text, I knew. I knew. With shaky fingers, I pushed the buttons to look at the text and listen to the messages.

The final voice message from my ex did me in. He said that Cindy was gone, and that her passing was already on Facebook, and that he didn’t want me to find out that way. And I dropped to the floor, wailing “NOooooooo”, my heart, my lungs, my breath, ripped from me.

When I finally got the strength to get up off the floor, I crawled in bed and handed my phone to my hubby. “Does this say what I think it says?” I asked him through gasps and sobs, a part of me praying that it was mistake; that I’d dreamed it; that my ex had said something entirely different, like he just wanted to say hi.

But it was not a dream. It was real. And a grief so strong, so palpable, gripped me, and I’ve been unable to shake it since.

I’m flat-out devastated that she’s gone. I still have questions for her. I want to hear her laugh again, and see her smile. I still have people I want her to meet. I still have plays I want to see with her. But I’m thankful that I recently got to tell her how much I love her, and how much she meant to me.

Some people might wonder why the death of a person I’m no longer technically related to would drop-kick me so hard. Well, I loved her. She loved me. Even after Cindy and I were no longer related by marriage, we remained friends, and I still consider her and her husband, Eddie, my family. They chose me to be their family, and I chose them to be mine.

I first met Cindy and Eddie as a little 18-year-old college-freshman dating their son, a girl with basically no social skills and no knowledge of the world. But they both accepted me just as I was. They didn’t try to change me; Cindy especially just embraced me and loved me and cheered for me and was sad with me when warranted. As another friend said when I told her about Cindy, “That makes her one of the special people who ever walked this Earth.”

I have known Cindy for more than half of my life! ~ 25 years. Even tho we were no longer technically related, I still sent her a mother’s day card every year, addressed to my “Dear Ex-Step-Mother-In-Law”, or “ESMIL” for short. Eddie told me that when his son and I got divorced, she cried and cried, afraid she’d never see me again. (BTW, if you’re in my family, my tribe, you don’t get rid of me that easily… I hang on if you’re important to me.)

Like me, Cindy loved the arts. I still have quite a collection of art that she either gave to me, or I purchased when we were together. I helped when she co-founded the Georgia Piedmont Arts Center up in Winder, Georgia.

We loved walking around arts festivals and going to plays, like the hilarious Waffle Palace at the Horizon Theater last Spring. I’ll never forget when the two of us went, years ago, to see a musical at the Fox – with pretty good seats, mind you – and the actors, as dirty travelers, jumped – quite nude! – into a tub of water. Although I may have forgotten the name of the play, I’ll never forget the hilarious – and startled – look on her face, as I’m sure it was mirrored on my own.

We didn’t get together as often as we wanted, but thankfully, it hasn’t been that long since we’d had a nice lunch and a quick shopping excursion together.

At Cindy’s death, knowing there was so little that I could do, I did what only I can: I wrote a piece to speak at her service. (And I’m forever indebted to Eddie and to my ex for allowing me to do so.)

As the four of us speaking at the service got ready (and passed around a flask), her friends, who I had never met before, told me how much Cindy loved me. That she talked about me all the time. That she didn’t love me because she “had” to, but because she wanted to. And her friends and I got along like a house on fire… and all I could think was “Damn you Cindy, for getting the four of us together for this. For your f*ing memorial service.”

And then later, discovering that her officiant not only graduated from high school the same year I did, she graduated in the same city from a rival high school. And of course I wanted to holler to Cindy all about it, about what a small world it is… but… other than the ghost of her presence sitting on a chair nearby, I couldn’t tell her.

And when one of her friends asked if the book she had in her library was my book… (yup) and when I realized the book was not just in the library but on the coffee table in plain view…. More tears. Buckets of them.

She’s real and truly gone, and those of us left have to keep living, to keep going on, to keep her memory alive and to make sure the people who mean a lot to us know it.

Grief is a strange thing, as is people’s reaction to it.

The week Cindy died happened to be my spring break from school. Instead of grading papers and getting caught up on school work, I… cried. I wrote the piece I spoke at her service. And … I cried. Hubby and I visited with Eddie. And … I cried. We attended the service, then the Celebration of Life, and then went to Eddie and Cindy’s house with some of her close friends… But other than that, I have no idea what I did. Other than cry. And cry. And cry some more.

The Monday after Spring Break, I collected every bit of strength I could to go to class and teach my students, even tho all I wanted to do was stay in bed and cry. But I’d made a commitment to them. And I thought it only fair that I tell them what happened. And for the most part, my students have been so kind, and understanding, and sweet. They’ve brought me chocolate, and flowers, and written sweet notes to cheer me up…

But now, since it’s been three weeks …. it seems that some people expect me to be over this grief. I had one student tell me “Oh, you’re still bothered by that?” My dear husband even told me he’d forgotten it wasn’t that long ago as I sat miserable and biting back tears over dinner two nights ago.

If you haven’t figured it out, I’m a tender soul. I feel things deeply. And Cindy’s death is reminding me of all kinds of other losses. Because, let’s face it, to be human means you will lose people. To be alive means that someday you will die.

I remember being 11, and our family’s planned trip to Niagara Falls (which I still haven’t visited!) being cut short by three deaths and three funerals in one week. My dad’s father, my great-aunt, and someone else I’ve forgotten.

I remember when one of my high school classmates died in the middle of my (I think) junior year.

When a classmate died in a head-on collision in front of our college, just moments before we arrived on the scene, his life cut short by a drunk driver. When our counselor died on the way back from a family funeral. When the chaplain, who I’d been quite close to, passed away.

When a college classmate, a fellow lover of words and writing and poetry, died of acute myelocytic leukemia on November 2, 2006, at just 33 years old, leaving behind a young wife and a two-year-old son.

I remember my dad’s mother’s death, and how surreal it was… She’d been sick, and my sister and I were on our way to see her, and she died two days before we got there.

My great-grandmother’s death, the woman who I loved most in the world as a little girl, the one who passed on her gifts of creativity and crocheting to me. Who would braid my hair when I was a child with tender hands. Whose love, I knew deep down in my little-girl bones, was unconditional.

My mother’s father’s death in 1998. How devastated I was, how I cried and cried and cried – a memory etched in my brain. And how grandpa cried the last time I saw him. He’d been very ill, so it was a blessing to have him pass. But how awful that grief was. And even today, I ran across a book about meteorology in a goodwill store, and wanted to cry, because that had been his chosen profession.

But this grief over Cindy is worse. Like all the griefs and losses I’ve ever had have ascended on me at once, giving me tears, inability to sleep, a lack of energy, and pain that truly feels like a rusty icepick in my heart…..

Of course, there’s all kinds of stuff written on the stages of grief. If you are grieving a friend, your pet rat, a job loss, anything, I recommend looking it up, and hopefully you’ll find something that will help you.

Most importantly, know that your grief is your own. Don’t let others tell you there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way, because they are flat-out-wrong, and need to be punched in the face. As a friend told me, “Grief isn’t a linear progression. It’s more like a pendulum with highs and lows.”

Grief is something that never leaves us, nor would we want it to. It has its own timeline. There’s no magic off switch. (Oh, how I wish there were!) And you’ll think you’re okay and you’ll see or hear something, and it’ll start all over again… Like, I was doing okay yesterday, until I had to put the reminder in my calendar to give the pup her monthly flea/heartworm meds, and I got to October, and saw Cindy’s name on my calendar. For a birthday she’ll never get to celebrate.

To my friends who have listened to me as I go through this, and supported me, and sent me images with lovely sayings, and given your unconditional love, thank you.

After 2,100 words, I guess I shall stop, but I’ll leave you with this quote from a poem by Mary Oliver, in The Summer Day:

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

You do, indeed, have one wild and precious life. Use it wisely. And kindly. And fill it with love.

Update on 4/14/14:

A friend sent me this short piece (author unknown), which I found very very comforting:

GRIEF IS AN HONOR

“Accumulated grief and sorrow, no longer to be held at bay, have swarmed up and blown the hinges off the gate. Grief and sorrow have flattened me.

“After the gate flew open, I learned the most important lessons of my life. I learned that grief is precisely equivalent to love, and the terrible grief felt after the loss of a person one has loved deeply is a necessary consequence of that love and represents its survival in another form.

“However bitterly, grief is an honor.

“I learned that grief universally saturates and enriches our world, for sooner or later loss of an almost unimaginable order transforms everyone. Parents die, brothers and sisters die, even children die, and these deaths create irreparable wounds that shrink over time but never heal. On all sides, tears lie just beneath the surface. The emotion that gives rise to those tears is a connective tissue extending far, far down into our common humanity and our individual beings, and in those depths it becomes indistinguishable from joy.”

I am honored to have been loved, and to love, so much.